“Associated With Marital Status”

August 14, 2019 11:00 AM

Flagrant Foul: Benching Teen Moms Before Title IX
posted by Etrigan (7 comments total)

I definitely misread that as "belching teen moms", both here and on the article itself, and I was very confused about what that had to do with Title IX. It wasn't until I'd read the whole thing, with no mention of burping, and circled back here that I realized my mistake.

Back on topic: Hell yeah to Rubel and her accidental crusade. Cooley sounds like someone who was progressive-ish in his own time and just...froze there, never to progress again, convinced he was still progressive even as he turned more and more regressive. Kinda like those people who tip 10% and say "that was generous when I was growing up!" and don't understand (care?) that the world has moved on around them and standards change.
posted by Hold your seahorses at 2:00 PM on August 14, 2019 [1 favorite]

6 on 6! Half court! I love these variations. I dislike how the pro boys leagues have come to define what these sports can be, but it's garbage if it's used to separate by gender. Change the size of the baseball for the boys. And hockey - just get rid of checking, the puck doesn't need to be a weapon too, and let's just replace American football with real football (what, too far?).

And this: “Husbands and homes were the first obligation of the wives.....We’ve got to have some housewives and some mothers or something’s going to happen to this society.” Which sounds terrible but really it's the whole "Rubel might not have been a women’s libber" attitude that is the saddest part.
posted by zenon at 3:09 PM on August 14, 2019

Thanks for sharing. Around this same time my mother won the Betty CrockerHome Maker of Tomorrow award for her high school. It looks like that went out of style in the late 1970s.
posted by CostcoCultist at 3:18 PM on August 14, 2019

That was super interesting, thank you! I particularly liked how the author contextualized the situation (reflecting on Cooley's motivations through conversations with his granddaughter and clippings from the era, bringing in another player who was also affected by Cooley's beliefs, weaving in historical news sources, etc). I knew nothing about Iowa high school girls' basketball but now I know a lot more.

Also, the success of Iowa girls' basketball in the era before Title IX makes me wonder if there's some similarities to Black teams under segregation? I'm thinking specifically of the strong community that developed to support the teams and the sheer talent that shone through even when the community was restricted in how it could promote those talents. There's a really neat book on the history of segregated football in Texas, Thursday Night Lights, that I think highlights some of what I mean. It's not that being separate is better (it's not), but rather that separation allows for people who are marginalized to flourish outside of the spotlight glare of those who are privileged.
posted by librarylis at 3:56 PM on August 14, 2019

I definitely misread that as "belching teen moms"

And I thought I was going to read about a time when ( a la the Finnish Wife Carry race) young men would bench press teen moms... but I was not disappointed to find this was not the case once I read the article.
posted by 445supermag at 4:55 PM on August 14, 2019 [2 favorites]

My grandmother played 6 on 6 basketball in the 1930s in a small farm town, so I really appreciated the description of the pace of the games. I never realized how much scoring there was in 6 on 6.
posted by eckeric at 5:15 PM on August 14, 2019 [1 favorite]

Her pelvic floor should get its own medal.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:49 AM on August 15, 2019